Alfred Flatow

Alfred Flatow

Memorial plaque for Alfred Flatow in Berlin, Schlesisches Tor

Alfred Flatow (born October 3, 1869 in Danzig ; † December 28, 1942 in Theresienstadt concentration camp ) was a German gymnast and Olympic champion .

Life

At the 1st Summer Olympics in Athens in 1896 , he was one of ten gymnasts from Germany. He won the individual competition on the parallel bars and came second on the horizontal bar . He was also victorious with the German team on parallel bars and bars (including his cousin Gustav Felix Flatow, who was six years younger ). He also took part in competitions in horse jumping, pommel horse and rings. Like most of the other German Olympic athletes in apparatus gymnastics, he was excluded from the German gymnastics club after his return , which at the time rejected the idea of ​​competition as "un-German".

In 1903 Flatow was a founding member of the Jewish Gymnastics Association , the first Jewish sports association in Europe. Because of the persecution by the National Socialists , he emigrated to the Netherlands in 1938 . After the German invasion, he was deported by the National Socialists to the Theresienstadt concentration camp , where he died in 1942.

In 1997 the city of Berlin honored Alfred Flatow and his cousin Gustav by renaming Reichssportfeldstrasse near the Olympic Stadium to Flatowallee . On the Lohmühleninsel on the Landwehr Canal in the Kreuzberg district , the Flatow sports hall also reminds of the two Flatows with its name and a plaque. The German Post AG was the 100th anniversary of the Olympic Games, a series of four stamps out; one of them shows Alfred and Gustav Flatow. Alfred Flatow was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1981.

On September 13, 2012, stumbling blocks were laid for him and his family in front of his former home in Berlin-Schöneberg , Landshuter Straße 33 .

literature

• Lorenz Peiffer : From Olympic champions to "Reich enemies" - The cousins ​​Alfred and Gustav Felix Flatow , in: Diethelm Blecking , Lorenz Peiffer (ed.) Sportsmen in the "Century of the Camps". Profiteers, resistors and victims. Göttingen: Die Werkstatt, 2012, pp. 255–261

Web links

Commons : Alfred Flatow  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Alfred Flatow in the catalog of the German National Library
• Alfred Flatow in the database of Sports-Reference (English; archived from the original )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Alfred Flatow in the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame ( Memento of the original from July 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.